


twenty-four steps

by sighduck



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Drabble, Exhaustion, Gen, Post-Battle, Walking Meditation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-26 02:31:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20922704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sighduck/pseuds/sighduck
Summary: 'Normally, this kata is supposed to be taught,' says her Master, 'supposed to belearnedafter five straight days of meditation.'





	twenty-four steps

'Normally, this kata is supposed to be taught,' says her Master, stretching out with a grunt, 'supposed to be _learned_ after five straight days of meditation.'

'I can't remember the last time I meditated,' Ahsoka says blankly, fighting off a yawn. She has adopted the human and near-human practice of yawning lately - naturally, it does nothing to relieve the fuzzy feeling in her head, the sluggishness of her limbs, the hypersensitivity of her senses. She can smell the ash and gore and bacta pads on herself, the anxiety and exhaustion.

After this, they are to divert course to General-- to Master Kenobi, who's run into unexpected trouble en route to Plexis.

All Ahsoka wants is to sleep. But sleep will not come. And so she sat with the 501st, dry-eyed, while they negotiated the burial place of three of their brothers - Drizz, Lope, and Quinn - they, who had been downed in the fight against the small party of Seppies planning to storm the planet's main produce processing plant.

The Seppies had fewer people in their party than Ahsoka had been led to believe. They had fought fiercely, they had fought dirty - and then they had died.

Bitter rations and damp woodfire followed hours of hard battle. And when dinner had finished, Rex, Swipe, Ked, Goan and so many others sat together around the fire, calmly discussing whose bodies would survive in transit to their next location. Normally it was an honour to bury a vod on the battlefield where she or he was felled - but there is a strangeness to this planet, this M'haeli, that seems to reject humans entirely.

'We are not like the humans here,' Goan had argued. 'This place cannot reject what it does not know.'

'We,' said Swipe darkly, 'are human enough.'

'Leave them to their business, Snips,' Anakin had chided Ahsoka, pulling her away from them. 'They wouldn't disrespect you by asking you to leave.'

And now he has brought her far away from any warmth she could have - to teach her kata.

Today, on his orders, on what should have been a quick and painless battle, three of their vod had died. Ahsoka knows it is wrong to blame her Master, and she does not blame him, not really - she knows he mourns for every soldier that does not survive the battlefield. She knows he has been swallowing his grief lately, his grief and his anger and his helplessness, the longer he is away from Master Kenobi.

He has not meditated much either, these past weeks, not that she has seen.

So what else does he have to teach her?

'I haven't really meditated, either,' says her Master, shrugging. 'Let's change that, shall we?'

'--The vods say the native H'drachi have put a curse in the land,' Ahsoka says, after a pause, tracing his movements in the near dark. In sketching the movements of this kata, he has moved further from her, deeper into the forest. 'Meant to confuse all humans.'

Anakin pauses - and he looks back at her with a smile she feels more in the Force than she can see on his face.

'Then I'll be relying on you and your senses, my young Padawan.' He falls into the kata again.

Ahsoka huffs out a breath, not quite a laugh, and quite easily stretches out into his steps behind him, following him deep into the forest. Her mind clears, taking in the cool wet green of the night; the chirrup of nightbirds she does not know; the curious, watching fear of the forest around her. She is no human - she cannot be so confused, she will not be scared so easily.

So she counts each breath in, and leaves the number with each breath out: each is the first, each is the last, each is the only one that matters.

She is the soreness in her breast bone, the stitches running down her left calf, the twitching pain of her lekku, the glancing touch of the Dark around her. She is all of these things, and nothing - she is Padawan to Anakin Skywalker, vod to the 212th and the 501st, soon to be Commander in her own right. She is alive, she is dead on her feet, she is certain, she is almost 16 - she is Ahsoka Tano.

* * *

(She is wrong - about everything. She is wrong.)

**Author's Note:**

> -['M'haeli was an agriworld in the Expansion Region ruled by a hereditary Human monarchy, despite its indigenous species being the H'drachi.'](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/M%27haeli/Legends)  
-Niju Shi Ho (twenty-four steps) is a [ real kata](http://www.imakarate.com/student-information/list-of-katas/). Per the source, '[t]he movements in this kata resemble waves breaking on a cliff.' There is absolutely no stipulation that you have to meditate a certain amount of time before using it.


End file.
